the defects of the Poem

I have yet to meet you, so I cannot speak with any certainty, but it seems to me that you have not read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Or rather perhaps you have read the Rime, but have neglected to recognize its overall lucidity, or in the words of Charles Lamb, have ignored the verses’ uncanny ability to reflect a condition “where the mind is kept in a placid state of little wonderments;”. At its height, Coleridge crafts this metaphorical journey within the deepest realms of an imagined consciousness which resound in one man’s cathartic quest toward solitude, and at its least, The Rime utilizes an unprecedented tendency to chaos and mystical experience.

You seem also to be flawed in your three futile justifications for the poem’s fallacies, or what you so inaptly name as its “defects”. Your second premise that the Mariner “ does not act, but is continually acted upon” seems somehow inextricably linked to your first claim that the “principal person has not distinct character” (refer again to Charles Lamb). In these and other similar matters I would like to refer you to Coleridge’s letter, to what I feel is in direct response to the two latter statements. By clarifying, the two “cardinal points of poetry” as “the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature” and “the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination”, it is my sincere belief that Coleridge is distinguishing himself from you in both style and aim. For as you so whole-heartedly stubbornly grasp onto the fading relics of distant language, accepting “real life” conservatively as the sole medium of metaphorical possibility, Coleridge by leaps and bounds dives into a well-spring of immortality in imagination and the super-naturalistic.

In the Mariner’s supposed passivity and dullness lies your obstinate refusal to accept the progress and expansion of metaphor, consequently casting you and your work behind a yet darker self-inflicted prison.